Change Partners

Change Partners will give an educated reader a deep understanding of a particular conceptual `village’ (memory, privacy, now change) -- hence the designation `intellectual ethnography.’ As a book about change, this is also a book about motion, becoming, and difference, because all of these concepts circulate around the same patches of meanings.

The titles of the first three chapters are self-explanatory as the three main inflections of the title: motion (mobility, mobility studies, the pleasures of walking), becoming (contingency, the clinamen, the new) and difference (dialectic and binary structure and the rejection of Hegel). The fourth chapter, `Life’, pretends to investigate growth but spends most of its time with agency. `Time’ looks at historical and social change, and the last chapter addresses the violence of change (revolution, speed, shock).

An apposite description for this work might come from John Partridge’s Treasure of Commodious Conceits of 1573 as he speaks of collecting knowledge that had previously been cloistered, converting coterie texts into things `meete and necessarie for the profitable use of all estates.’